Protecting Hyper-V

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Applies To: System Center Data Protection Manager 2010

System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 extends DPM support to Microsoft Hyper-V. DPM now supports both host-based protection for Hyper-V where the agent is installed on the host computer, and guest-based where the agent is installed directly on the virtual machine.

DPM Support Scenarios

DPM 2010 supports the following scenarios for Hyper-V.

  • Online backup

    DPM 2010 supports online backups for guests running Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2003. Online backups ensure that DPM does not bring down the protected virtual machine. By default, DPM tries to protect virtual servers in the online mode.

  • Offline backup

    DPM 2010 supports offline protection for guests running older operating systems such as Windows NT 4.0 and Windows Server 2000, and Linux. Offline backup requires DPM to pause a virtual server, take a snapshot of the server, bring the virtual server online again, and then back up the snapshot.

  • Clustering

    DPM 2010 supports protection for clustered servers, clustered Hyper-V host server, and Windows Server Core-based Hyper-V hosts. DPM also supports Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) Quick Migration.

Unsupported Scenarios

DPM 2010 does not support the backup of virtual machines that do not have storage on the host. However, if you have at least one VHD of the virtual server on the local machine, DPM protects the local VHD.

Storage not on host means you either use iSCSI to present volumes to the virtual machine or use a remote VHD. For such machines, we recommend that customers perform host-level backup of the VHD files using DPM and install an agent into the virtual machine to back up data that is not visible on the host.

Warning

If you migrate your file server volume using DPM tools and want to continue backups to the same replica volume, you cannot perform original location recovery for the recovery points created before the migration. Recovery fails with the message - Couldn't find the selected volume. You can, however, perform recovery to an alternate location.

See Also

Concepts

Conditions When DPM Fails to Back up Hyper-V Virtual Machines in an Online State